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Guided Meditation: Wholesome Attention

Good morning, all. I am appreciating all the greetings. The weather reports from around the world, reports of how the flora and fauna are doing, give me a sense of place and connection. Thanks, that's great.

Welcome back. This is the third in a series of sessions on a teaching I'm calling the Five Faces of Compassion. These are five faces that arise in response to dukkha^[1]—suffering, dis-ease, or unsatisfactoriness.

As we saw with the first level of dukkha, when you're enmeshed in it, the available compassion is pretty modest. It's patience, willingness to stay, and the confidence that this is going to change. It's not so much a distance or a perspective from what's happening, but just these qualities. Then, as that patient, modest compassion is sustained, something shifts. A different relationship to suffering comes to be, and in turn, a new form of compassion.

The second level of dukkha is when there's just a little bit of space, and compassion then becomes this little bit of greater capacity. Now, this morning, as the practice continues, something surprising and humbling starts to happen: a new relationship to dukkha, and in turn, a new form of compassion.

For the meditation this morning, it's based on the observation that we have a pretty amazing capacity to contribute to our state in subtle ways. We'll talk about some of the challenges of this during the dharma talk, but while we're sitting together, I want to use this principle that we can contribute to our state in simple, subtle ways to contribute something wholesome. Let's do that for a while.

So, let's start. Let's settle in, establishing ourselves here. Now, settling into sensing your support—your physical support. What's holding up your bones? Let the eyes gently close.

From that physical sense of support, let the spine grow long, maybe with an in-breath. The spine growing long through the upper back, through the neck, through the crown of the head. Balanced, at ease, relaxing into upright.

Letting the sense of the body breathing, the sensations of the body breathing, come forward. Maybe helping this along with a few deep breaths in, and all the way out.

And when you're ready, let the breathing return to its natural rhythm. There's nothing the body needs to do. Being present for whatever arises.

This mindfulness itself is so wholesome, so nourishing. It brings with it other wholesome qualities. You may notice, as you stay present, the arising of some other wholesome aspect, some other wholesome dharma. It might be quick like the flash of a firefly, or it might well up slowly like a natural spring.

The invitation is to stay gently attentive, sensitive to what's wholesome right here. A wholesome attention, a nourishing mindfulness, giving space for the wholesome to grow.

Present here with this confidently, easefully, willingly, wholesomely. What do you notice?

This mindfulness is so wholesome. What other qualities are coming along? It has a brief flash or a long sustained arising. What is wholesome attention giving rise to?

Present here with this patiently, confidently, wholesomely.

May our wholesome practice of mindfulness be a benefit for all beings.

Dharmette: Five Faces of Compassion (3 of 5); Humility

Well, hello again. Where I am, it's Wednesday morning. We've had two practice sessions together on the faces of compassion. To recap, the first is patience when we're enmeshed with dukkha. The second is when some little bit of capacity becomes available. Today, what tends to happen next naturally as this practice unfolds is a surprising and humbling form of compassion.

The first point is that in Gil Fronsdal's^[2] frames of the levels of dukkha, the third he lined out was recognizing my contribution.

One way this can look, of course, is that it's possible to look wisely and honestly at our own suffering. When we're meditating, often our challenges will come to visit, and they can be seen in the light of mindfulness. One of the things that we see is that dukkha, like all other things, arises based on conditions. It arises based on conditions, and some of those conditions come from beyond us. They're external circumstances or anything else. That's not surprising at all. What might be surprising is that some of the conditions that hold our dukkha in place and sustain suffering are our own contribution.

This is the third level of dukkha, and it tends to ripen in a particular form of compassion. I want to tell you a story about this to develop it. It's a humbling story from when I was a yogi on retreat a long while ago.

As you might know, on meditation retreat, small things become really big things. I had this yogi job. It's a great thing we do; everyone chips in to take part in putting on the retreat. I had my own role, which involved drying some dishes as part of a team. The ask of a yogi job like this is that you bring your whole presence. You bring your mindfulness to the activity, as a retreat doesn't stop.

So I'm there, I'm present, I'm doing my work. My drying hands are there, as is my whole mind, including the hindrances. I kept having this recurring thought while I'm drying these dishes with this other yogi. The thought was, "This yogi is doing this all wrong." It's kind of fuzzy now what the details were. Maybe there was some little thing that I didn't think was as sanitary as it should be. Or maybe they weren't drying the dishes completely, or maybe their towel had a little fuzz on it. I don't know. It was something innocuous; it didn't really matter.

Whatever it was, we worked together each day, so I had plenty of time to observe my reactions and a lot of time for my obsession with this scene to recur on the meditation cushion. As I'm sitting there meditating, this is coming to visit. One of the first things I notice is that the story just keeps repeating. It's like rehearsal and rehearsal of how wrong this person was.

But as the story is repeating, I'm noticing I'm the one who's suffering sitting here. As the story repeats, he doesn't know, he doesn't mind! But this activity of the mind, just repeating and repeating, is so unpleasant to the body, so unpleasant to the mind. I was the one who was having the problem.

Thanks so much to mindfulness, it kicks on, the curiosity gets going, and mindfulness starts to notice the details of what's happening here in my experience as I'm sitting. So, watching pretty closely what was actually happening, every time the scene arose in my mind, there was this chain reaction in the body. I would physically feel warmer, and the muscles in my face would contract. Mental space would kind of close in, and the condition for this was just a thought. It was just a thought, and it changed my body.

So mindfulness keeps doing its work looking at this thought. Not enmeshed with the thought, but viewing it as it is. Mindfulness is getting to know it more closely and got interested in what specifically the condition is that's generating this reaction. It wasn't the image; the image of him in my mind itself was neutral. It wasn't the overall sensations of the body that was igniting this chain reaction. But observed patiently enough, pretty soon the main condition revealed itself. It was like the linchpin that was holding the whole assembly together. It was two things: a physical sensation of pressure in my head, and the words in my mind, "We don't do it this way." Those were the two conditions.

Seeing this clearly, I didn't even have to do anything. It's like the whole thing cooled. The whole thing softened. The grip on the story softened immediately. The story didn't stop coming right away—it kept appearing for a while, but a little quieter each time. And at some point, I noticed that it had stopped completely. So the next time I was on the dish-drying team with the other person, there was no charge, no issue, no recurring thought, just a simple relationship, even appreciation. And I love that he never knew this whole process happened and he was none the wiser.

One point of interest I want to emphasize: I didn't do the cooling. I didn't do the taking apart of the suffering. It was the clear seeing of what was actually happening here that cooled it. It was like watching a magic trick. The illusion is captivating until you can see what is holding the trick together, and then it's not so convincing anymore.

The key point of the story is that I recognized in all of this that there was something in me that I was contributing that was holding this dukkha in place. It was like my subterranean story had been holding the thing in place the whole time. And when mindfulness and wisdom had settled in and seen it, the illusion couldn't hold together anymore.

One thing to take care with: I don't want to encourage a fault-finding mission within yourself to search out your shortcomings and say, "Ah yeah, this is how I'm generating suffering for myself." That has the risk of adding self-criticism to dukkha. Instead, our aim is a caring and careful attention that over time simply shows us what's going on here right now. We just might see what's holding dukkha in place, and the contribution may become evident to us.

If this comes up and it includes some sort of harsh self-judgment like, "I should have known better, this is so messed up, this is my fault," that's adding a layer of dukkha to dukkha. I guess that's okay enough. But the way toward freedom is to notice it, name it, return gently to the here and now, gently to presence, and let mindfulness do its work.

Approached with wisdom, these contributions can be humbling, but they can also in time be seen with a sense of awe, wonder, or even levity rather than blame or self-criticism. It's like, "Oh, look at me doing this again. Isn't this something?"

This is how I want to name the third face of compassion: humility. The first time I saw something like this, the way I contributed to my own dukkha, it really struck me. It was hard, difficult to sit with. But it was part of a broader opening. Over the years for me, the process has tended to become more and more gentle. Now I catch myself in similar ways. I discover how I'm contributing to dukkha in some way right now, and the response usually is something closer to, "Oh, look at me doing this again. Oh, of course." And then I adjust. There's something almost tender in the process, and certainly something humbling.

I like the words of Zen teacher Zenju Earthlyn Manuel^[3] for this: "Aren't we something? Aren't we something?"

So perhaps we could say that humility, in this sense, entails the willingness to feel into another way of being. There's freedom in that. Our compassion can grow.

Something else I heard from a Zen teacher a long time ago—it took me a long time to understand, but this face of compassion helps me make sense of it. When I was just starting out in practice, I asked this Zen teacher, "Why are Zen teachers' robes brown? The novice priests wear black robes, teachers wear brown ones." And he said, "Oh, why are Zen teachers' robes brown? That's because by the time you wear one, you're as humble as dirt." It took me a lot of years to know what he meant, but this process of humble recognition, this third face of compassion, makes sense out of it.

One more note about this level of dukkha and this level of compassion. Sometimes I've heard that Joseph Goldstein^[4] offers an instruction that I found useful, and a practitioner at Insight Meditation Center reminded me of it pretty recently in a Q&A. Joseph teaches to the right person at the right time that if thoughts are persistent in the mind—say you find yourself in a thought loop about someone else's wrongness—he encourages imagining that the thoughts in your head are actually from the mind of the yogi next to you. They're not even yours. They're just passing through.

I love how this kind of quick reframe undermines our sense of the demands that come with a story, our sense of the demands of the story being true. They're not even ours. Maybe this thought experiment can help clear the way a little bit to see our contribution to dukkha that might be there with a little less charge.

The arc, as we sustain this honest seeing with mindfulness, as our contributions make themselves known to us, and as humility ripens, is that something even finer becomes available. We'll have a look at what this is tomorrow, and the form of compassion that comes to arise in response.

But for today, you might hold the question: What's actually here? What's actually here? Or, a callback to yesterday: Is there anything here I'm not willing to pay attention to? And can I include that?

May our compassionate practice be for the benefit of all beings. I appreciate being with you. Take good care.